Nicholas Kristof Says Busting Johns Is the Key to Shutting Down the World's Oldest Profession

Is there any police activity more pointless and pathetic than a "sting" aimed at people seeking to buy arbitrarily proscribed products or services? It is bad enough when the government criminalizes a transaction—a wager, a drug purchase, the exchange of money for sex—that violates no one's rights. When cops go out of their way to enforce that prohibition by tricking people into talking about transactions that will never occur, they manufacture "crimes" that are doubly phony. So how should we view armed agents of the state who invite people to engage in peaceful exchange, only to pounce on them with guns and handcuffs?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof thinks they're heroes. Consider the breathless opening of his latest column equating prostitution with "human trafficking":

Several police officers are waiting in a hotel room, handcuffs at the ready, when they get the signal. A female undercover officer posing as a prostitute is with a would-be customer in an adjacent room, and she has pushed a secret button indicating that they should charge in to make the arrest.

The officers shove at the door connecting the rooms, but somehow it has become locked. They can't get in. The undercover officer is stuck with her customer. Tension soars. Curses reverberate. A million fears surge.

Then, suddenly, the door frees and the police officers rush in and arrest a graying 64-year-old man, Michael. His smugness shatters and turns to bewilderment and shock as police officers handcuff his hands behind his back.

Exciting stuff. It takes a brave cop to join with several of his heavily armed colleagues in ambushing a defenseless 64-year-old who has committed the unpardonable offense of being smug in the presence of a fake prostitute.

How does Kristof justify this unprovoked violence? In his usual slippery way. "Some women sell sex on their own," he concedes, "but coercion, beatings and recruitment of underage girls are central to the business as well." Then he mentions "a 14-year-old girl in Queens" who ran away from home and was "locked up by pimps and sold for sex." Although they threatened to kill her if she tried to escape, "after three months she managed to call 911."

What exactly does that 14-year-old girl have to do with poor Michael, the john arrested in a Chicago hotel room after responding to an online ad placed by the Cook County Sheriff's Office? Unless the ad referred to an underage girl held against her will, there is no reason to think that Michael or any of the other men arrested in prostitution stings are complicit in such crimes. But they must suffer, Kristof says, because "police increasingly recognize that the simplest way to reduce the scale of human trafficking is to arrest men who buy sex." He insists "that isn't prudishness or sanctimony but a strategy to dampen demand."

This strategy—cops posing as prostitutes—has been a joke and a cliché for as long as I've been alive, but Kristof considers it the cutting edge of innovative policing. If targeting customers is all it takes to eradicate black markets, why do they still exist? People have been buying and selling sex for thousands of years, but Kristof seems to think they will stop if only we can get enough pretty police officers to impersonate hookers. He calls sting operations "marvels of efficiency"—which they are, assuming you want to produce futile arrests and gratuitous humiliation.

Kristof claims men who pay for sex, even when the transactions involve consenting adults, "perpetuate" crimes against women, because some prostitutes are forced into the business by threats of violence. By the same logic, people who buy automobiles perpetuate car theft, and people who hire domestic help perpetuate slavery. If anyone is perpetuating prostitution-related violence, it is prohibitionists like Kristof, who insist on maintaining a black market in which both buyers and sellers face unnecessary risks and victims are treated like criminals.

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In donning the breastplate of righteousness, the covert deviant assumes a protective shield of superpropriety. His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of the practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous ? an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking. However much the covert participant may be reacting to guilt in erecting his defensive barrier, he is also engaging in a performance that is part and parcel of his being. Goffman remarks that “there is often no reason for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embarass.” The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man ? hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.

That’s just a form of projection. People like that think others are like them and so they hide it, because they know it’s disapproved of, but that’s why they’re often accusing everyone else of doing it, because they project their own issues onto everyone else.

See also homophobic preachers who get found with rent boys, drug control advocates who get busted doing drugs, etc.

I agree with you. I’m not sure where Humphreys stood in relation with Jung, but the great irony of all this was Humphreys, himself, was a closeted gay man who was married to a woman until the 1980s when he came out, a good ten years after he published Tearoom Trade.

Prostitutes take away a huge amount of the power these women have because they (the Jezebelians, not the prostitutes) can withhold sex. Its not like the women there seem to have much else to offer and if her man can go down the street to get it then her monopoly power is broken.

I ask the same question, nicole. If a girlfriend tried to use withholding sex as a lever against me, she’d be out the door so fast she wouldn’t have time to have her head spin. I do not get how this works on some dudes. But then again, I am 1) not the type to get involved with someone who would do that or think it was ok, and 2) if you try to control me, I will do the exact opposite of what you want just to say “fuck you”, so this is a really bad tactic to use on me.

I’ve had people ask me why I don’t withhold sex myself, and I’m like…uh…because it would be wrong and insane? I mean seriously, I’ve had people ask and/or suggest it, and all I can really say is that that would not be acceptable to me ethically, but it also would not be remotely acceptable in my cultural milieu. I can’t imagine not getting broken up with for some crazy shit like that.

“So nicole, why don’t you attempt to grossly and crudely manipulate the person you supposedly love and respect by refusing to have sex with them, thereby also indicating that you clearly don’t care that much about having sex with them if it’s that easy for you to withhold it, kind of asking the question, why are you with them then?”

And this is the other reason the Jezzies will never support legalized prostitution: someday, somewhere, some prostitute will turn away a black customer, and then the Jezzies will have to choose a side.

To be fair, it does come from both sides. However, I’m generally much less scared of the efforts of those on the Right because they tend to be limited to passing out “Sex Workers for Christ” pamphlets a few times a year.

I think social conservative is a reasonable way to refer to the type of progressive leftists who want to ban prostitution, drugs, foul language in movies, violent video games, etc. They are certainly no kind of liberals on social issue. Legal abortion, BC and such have been around for long enough that supporting those things can be considered conservative in a way.

Since we’ve been on the subject of cops being sociopaths and the fact that ballooning police force sizes have made it so that their ranks are full of the worst possible candidates (not that they were full of good eggs before) who have nothing useful to do, I’d just like to point out that there isn’t a lot more sociopathic and fucked up than a person whose job it is is to fool people into trusting them and then suddenly arresting them for (often consensual) crimes. Think about the kind of person you’d have to be to do that, do it well, and keep doing it. Not only would you have to be unable to come to care for people, you’d have to have no problem betraying them, lying to them, and then turning around and doing it all over again.

And vice cops are the worst (I’m sorry Crockett and Tubbs!), because that’s basically all they do, since pretty much everything they pursue is a consensual crime. Undercover cops are like the sociopaths’ sociopath.

The men’s cars are also towed, which costs them another $700 or so. Mike Anton, commander of the vice unit, says that he always tells the married men that they can avoid towing fees if they call their wives to have them pick up the car.

“None of them has ever taken me up on that,” he added.

Ho, ho! How droll, Mike of the Vice Unit!

And to think that we raise a sanctimonious eyebrow to Saudi Arabia and their religious police.

Kristof claims men who pay for sex, even when the transactions involve consenting adults, “perpetuate” crimes against women, because some prostitutes are forced into the business by threats of violence.

If prostitution were legal, how much of a market would there be for forcing women into the business?

It’s like any black market. Restrict the availability of a product (in this case, sex), and the price rises, which makes it profitable to take additional risks (i.e. kidnapping) to make those profits. Make something illegal, and the people involved (Johns and hookers) can’t go to the police if a violent crime is involved. Make something illegal, and the people involved have to settle disputes through violence instead of contracts and courts.

Mow much harder would it be to run a kidnapping ring if every John could legally call the police if a woman told him she was kidnapped? How much harder would it be to get customers for an illegal sex slave, if your customers can go to a legal brothel or hire a call girl without risking prosecution?

Why would anyone travel to a seedy motel, deal with a seedy scumbag, and pay for some bruised skank when they can walk to their nearest Whorebucks and drop $5* for the double-frap from the HJ barrista.

*I imagine in a liberalized market, price points will develop close to this hypothetical

People regularly act like their only real concern is trafficking, but that could easily be solved by laws that don’t criminalize the prostitute, only the pimp – which is common in many jurisdictions, even though it’s still a dumb law.

I think the real answer is that people think prostitution, like drugs, child labor, foreign factories, and for certain people guns, have acquired a sense of being culturally tainted as something bizarre that only the poor, stupid, or tasteless would ever be comfortable with. Therefore, these items must be controlled, wrangled, segregated, regulated, or quarantined to protect the rest of society from the taint.